The Road Home

by Kristin Harmel

That was the day I remembered what it was to be a mother. My heart, which had been sealed and shrouded since the day we had learned of Gabriel’s fate, creaked open, letting in a sliver of light, as a little Jewish girl who’d lost her home walked timidly into ours.

he hadn’t made the mistake I had. He had not become her father as I had imagined myself her mother.

I felt as if someone had opened me up and scooped out my insides like the flesh of a potato, leaving nothing but hollowed skin behind.

The war had taken so much from all of us. I had spent the last five years believing that it was parents like Frédéric and me who had lost the most. What could be worse than knowing your child had died on a battlefield, defending France in vain, while you were hundreds of kilometers away, unable to protect him? But I realized now that perhaps it was even more terrible to be in the shoes of someone like Josiane’s mother, forced to give up your child, not knowing whether she had survived, unaware of who she had become.

Bearing a child was an act of self-sacrifice. But loving that child, knowing that child inside and out, was the real magic.

The knowing of these things in the depths of my own marrow was what made me her mother, and after a time, it no longer mattered that she was not my flesh and blood, nor that she was not meant to be mine to keep. Now, it seemed, those things meant everything.

Would she remember that once, she had been loved by a woman who would never belong here?

I couldn’t bring myself to look down at her, for I knew what I would see there: recognition of the woman she belonged with. Realization that the woman who had been masquerading as her mother for the last three years was a fraud. Understanding that she was never meant to have loved me at all, that everything she had felt for me was a mistake.

“You are the one who watched over her?” The words weren’t meant to wound, but they cut to the core, stripping me of all the ways I’d loved Josiane, of all the ways in which Josiane had glued back together my shattered heart. Indeed, that was all I’d been—merely a watcher, perhaps not a mother to her at all.

I had once been a lifeline; now I was an interloper. How quickly I had changed from needed to needing.

“It isn’t brave when it is the only thing to do,”

The right thing often takes the most courage and the most sacrifice. And you know she will be safe here. She will be loved.” “But she won’t be mine.”

“You are a part of who she is, and of who she will become,” he said. “There is nothing in the world that shapes a child more than a mother.”

“But you said yesterday that she was never mine.” He cleared his throat. “She wasn’t. But you were hers. And you will be always.”

we wound through the countryside, France unfurled before us in all her glory. She was healing from the war, slowly erasing the devastation, already on her way to becoming herself again, in a way I feared I never would.

“You aren’t lonely?” “No, Madame Vachon. I meet her each night in my dreams.”

Inside awaited the rest of my life, a life in which I was a mother only in my memories,

I stared up at our house, not ready yet for that future to begin, although it already had.

“Being a parent means letting go, doesn’t it? We give our children wings, but then they must fly alone.”

“After she was gone, I needed the daily assurance that no matter how broken I felt, the sun would still rise. So now I watch the sky to the east each morning as a reminder that life continues, even when it doesn’t look the way we thought it would. Life continues, even when we are powerless over the things that hurt us. Life continues, even when we can’t know the future. God is with us in that sunrise, in that promise of a new day, in that reassurance of a tomorrow.”

Turning toward the sunrise meant looking in the direction in which both my children had been taken from me. What if that which I saw there wasn’t the promise of a future, but rather the mirage of a past that could never be recovered?

The future never looks the way we expect it to, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.”

loved her enough to send her into the unknown, realizing it was the only way to save her life.

The beauty brought tears to my eyes, for it reminded me that ends could be beautiful, but they were always followed by beginnings.

I understood, gazing out at the brilliant western sky, that I couldn’t live my life staring at only the endings. I needed to look east, toward each new day.

It was time to begin again, for this was the only life I had.

safe in the arms of the mother who had loved her for just the right number of heartbeats,

Josiane had needed a mother, and I’d had a hole in my heart just the size of a child, and though we had each fulfilled something vital for the other, it was never meant to last. By loving her, I had given her the only gift I had left to give, and in giving that gift, my own heart had begun to mend.

Motherhood never ceases, even through loss and pain, for to carry a child in one’s heart is to belong to that child forever.